Page 8 of Six Wild Crowns

Seymour has always adored the view from here, and regards it as the most beautiful of the six scrind roads leading out of High Hall. Facing due north, towards Daven, she can see the path winding up and up, until hill transforms into the mountain range of the Heahmores, brutal and elegant as hawks’ beaks.

The scrind roads fan out like a spider’s web, each one flowing through a series of ringed gardens. The inner segments of land adjacent to each queen’s wing is theirs to cultivate as they wish. Aragon has chosen to turn hers into orchards. A dozen orangeries dot the grounds, each one housing plants and fruit trees from Quisto – everything about Queen Aragon’s existence on Elben is a sign of her homesickness. It starts to rain while Seymour waits for Clarice to fetch a carriage, so she takes shelter in the nearest greenhouse. It’s nearly as big as the Royal Sanctuary, and it houses rows of fruit trees, interspersed between smaller plants. The air is loamy. At the far end of the greenhouse, a gardener pours cloudy liquid onto thebase of the trees. He bows lightly as she approaches. Seymour sniffs a squat bush that sports the most beautiful dusky pink flowers, and finds herself coming over faint.

“Careful, my lady,” the gardener says, putting down his watering jug in alarm. “That’smamera, that is.”

“I haven’t heard of it,” she says, allowing him to lead her to a wooden bench set on one side of the path.

“Put you right to sleep. Specially if you put it in your drink, but a good sniff like you had can do the trick too.”

“I had no idea. I didn’t mean to take you from your work.”

He takes Seymour’s words as a rebuke rather than an apology, returning to his watering jug with a scowl.

“Why are you not giving them water?” she asks him, trying to make things right between them.

“Water’s water,” he responds, and she doesn’t know what to say to that. “This stuff – this stuff’s extraordinary. Made up specially from manure sent by Queen Cleves herself.”

Queen Cleves is easy to forget about. She’s reputed to be ugly and dim-witted, so much so that the king never visits her if he can help it. But this man talks about her as if she’s a goddess.

“What’s so special about it?” Seymour asks, covering her nose surreptitiously, for the smell of the liquid, even at a distance, is exactly what one would expect of something made from dung.

“Cernunnos knows, but it works. Sweetest fruits we’ve ever had since Queen Cleves started sending it to us.”

He reaches up and plucks one of the fruits from a low-hanging branch, handing it to her. The fruit is a deep purple, with a fine fuzz across the skin. She’s seen these on the platters brought for the queen when the ambassadors from Quisto are visiting. Aragon has never allowed any Elben-born member of her household to try them before. Seymour wonders whether it’s wise to eat something fed by a mysterious liquid from a rival queen, but she supposes if Queen Cleves was going to poison them, she’d be subtler about it. She takes a bite. The flesh is scarlet inside, and the juice drips down her chin unbecomingly. She doesn’t care, though, even when the gardener smirks. It’s like spiced honey.

“I’ve never eaten anything more delicious,” she says.

“I told you so.”

The door to the greenhouse opens and Clarice puts their head around the door.

“My lady? Your carriage is ready.”

Seymour wipes the juice from her chin with her sleeve.

“You off to Daven?” the gardener says. When she nods, he makes her wait while he retrieves a basket and fills it with the purple fruits. He lays a cloth over the basket and hands it to her.

“There’s twenty in here,” he says loudly enough for anyone who might be loitering to hear, but looking at Seymour and Clarice pointedly. “For Queen Aragon only.”

Clarice brings the basket into the carriage and pulls the curtains shut as it trundles out of High Hall and towards the Heahmore mountains. Taking the scrind road always makes Seymour feel nauseous – there’s something about the dissonance between the stately speed they travel at and the rate at which the landscape beyond the road passes that turns her stomach.

When they’re sure that the groom clinging to the side of the carriage isn’t going to peer in, Seymour and Clarice flip the coverlet off the top of the basket and count the fruits inside – twenty-two. A gift, just for them. Maybe, Seymour thinks, as she devours hers, eyes closed, the Seymour luck is changing after all.

CHAPTER FIVE

Boleyn

Brynd Castle reminds Boleyn of the ancient goddesses, the ones whose wind-worn statues still stand on Elben’s deserted hilltops. Brynd is built on a precipice, tall, ancient and scarred. At its apex is a single turret, crowned with lightning rods, that leans out over the storm-ridden sea as though daring the waves to topple it. Beyond the sea, just visible in the fading light, is the bordweal. The bruised whorls of light are clearer on the horizon, where wind meets water. Purple and green flicker into red and turquoise like playful cubs. Boleyn cranes her neck, following the curve of the dome up, up, up. In her childhood, she and her siblings would lie on the grass outside Hever at sunset, simply to witness the storm of the island’s protection. They would imagine themselves as birds, with the ability to fly the full length of the bordweal, from Mathmas in the north-west, all the way to Hyde on the south-east coast.

But today the uppermost reaches of the dome are fainter than Boleyn remembers. Fainter, thus, frailer. It has been only a matter of months since the last surviving queen of Henry’s father, the Dowager Queen Huntlye died, leaving Brynd un-queened. Boleyn is certain the bordweal did not used to weaken so quickly. Perhaps things changed while she was abroad.

They arrive in the castle’s forecourt on the brink of sunset, the carriage hurtling across the drawbridge and coming to a halt before Boleyn’s new stewardess. Mistress Syndony is an ebony-haired grandmother with light-brown skin. Her expression is stern but the lines around her eyes suggest she is used to smiling, and often, in the right company. She welcomes Henry and Boleyn with a bob of a curtsey, very upright, and leads them towards the castle.

“The masters are assembled in the bedchamber already,” she tells them, only a shrewd flick of the eyes telling Boleyn how she feels about the tradition of public consummation.

“She needs to meld with the castle first,” Henry says.

He takes Boleyn to the outer wall, where a gargoyle head erupts from the stone at head height. Its grotesque expression – rolling eyes and distended tongue – is still sharply delineated despite its age.

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